Review: Return of the Jedi is no better than an adequate climax to George Lucas’ original Star Wars trilogy, and certainly with retrospect, was beginning to betray the franchise’s increasingly infantile bent and crude storytelling manner. A case in point is the Ewok characters that litter the final two-thirds of the movie: though inarguably a fine creation for another child fantasy movie, their ‘cute’ aesthetic acts as an awkward and trivial juxtaposition to the epic conclusion of the Emperor/Luke/Vader segment. Likewise, the Luke-Vader subplot spirals ever-so-slightly too far and arbitrarily into a Spielbergian father-son paradigm of sentimentality and further from the more cloudy and mythic crisis that was being inferred throughout The Empire Strikes Back. By the end, the filmmakers somehow reach the anticipated climax with a fair level of cogency, but without the wonder and lustre that had pervaded the previous two instalments. (May 2007)